Whether you have a new project kicking off or it’s simply the end of your summer vacation, fall is the perfect time to face new business challenges.
This fall is also a great time to start working on yourself and your personal brand. As an experienced professional, you know how important networking is for advancing your business and career. It’s all about making meaningful connections.
However, we have to be aware that those connections are often made online. HR professionals and recruiters are turning to social media to screen potential job candidates to such an extent that the phenomenon now has its own name: social hiring.
Whether it’s a new peer you just met at a business conference, a potential business partner you connected with via LinkedIn, or a future employer, chances are you are going to turn to the internet to research them. Without a doubt, you can expect that the same is happening to you – these same peers, employers, and connections will look you up.
Are you in control of what people are seeing about you online?
Use this new season to clean up your online presence, make it consistent across all channels, and make sure it communicates your professional credentials and achievements.
Let’s get started with five useful tips to help your personal brand grow.
1. Be aware of your digital footprint
Every action you take online – from posting on social media to buying a book on Amazon, creates a digital footprint that identifies you.
Working professionals usually face two issues when it comes to their professional personas online: they have so many profiles across various social media sites that it makes it difficult to control their online narrative, or they have nothing that showcases their professional achievements because they never thought about it before.
Before we move on to our next tip, you have to know where you stand now.
The best way to see what is available about you online is to Google yourself. Google your name using the incognito window on your browser so the results are not impacted by your browsing history. Focus on the first page results to see what is there.
Do those results showcase who you are as a professional? Do they show a human you would love to work with? Do they show someone you would trust with an important project?
Most importantly, does it fit the image you want people to have of you?
2. Think about how you want people to perceive you professionally
As the popular advice goes, you should dress not for the job you have, but for the job you want. Before we go any further, think not about where you are, but where you want to be. How do you want people to perceive you professionally?
The goal is not to build a false image or create a profile of a person that does not exist. On the contrary, being authentic when building your personal brand is crucial – it will make you human and relatable. What we want to make sure comes to light is the person you are in your entirety.
It might be useful here to think about:
Skills you have that many people don’t know about |
Skills you would like to work on in the future or are working on right now |
Skills you need for you dream job |
A misconception that people have about you or your profession that you would like to change/correct |
Your professional achievements and the value you provide to the team you are part of |
What makes you do what you do. For example, why you love and feel passionate about what you do |
Your answers to these questions will give you a good idea of what is currently out there and what should be.
While going through the next tips, keep this gap in mind. That is what we are working on!
3. Clean up your social media profiles
Chances are, the first few search results connected to your name will be your social media profiles. This is okay as long as your profiles communicate what you want them to communicate.
Obviously, when it comes to social media, it is not all about your professional skills, it is also about who you are outside of work. In fact, when auditing social media profiles of their potential job candidates, recruiters usually use social media data to estimate the cultural fit.
You want your social media to tell a story about your hobbies and passions. Also, by nature of social media, your communication there is bound to be a bit more relaxed, which is okay, but you have to screen for offensive and inappropriate content. In this case, it’s better to err on the side of caution.
While going through your profiles, remove all problematic photographs, videos, and posts. Remember that rant from three years ago that got so many comments and likes? Perhaps it’s time to delete it.
We grow and change. That is why it’s useful to go over your old posts, likes, and tweets, and remove those that no longer reflect your interests or personality. Don’t let your past haunt you! Some of those might be of your own creation and some may have been shared by others.
Moving forward, set up your Facebook profile so you have to review and approve every tag and mention. Create a close friends list on Instagram and choose which stories are for the “public” and which for close friends. Alternatively, make your Instagram profile private altogether to have some control over your feed and who sees it.
Finally, before every share, ask yourself “Would I be appearing on a morning talk show for everyone to see this post?” If you have any reservations about it, skip sharing that one!
4. Create an online hub that gathers all your information in one place
Even after you’ve done all this groundwork, social media profiles represent just a sliver of your personality.
For example, my Instagram profile can tell you all about my travels and hiking achievements, Facebook is more about the content I create and conferences I speak at, and my LinkedIn profile serves as my online resume. That is why I make sure I have one place that gathers it all and showcases my multifaceted personality: my personal website.
If you google my name, I am sure the first thing you see is my personal website. It has been built on an online domain connected to my name, which gives it an SEO boost and outlines all the key information I think someone should know about me.
The key here is not to tell you everything, but to set the context so that wherever you go next, you know how that fits in my overall image.
Personal websites are unique to their owners, and the information you choose to put there depends on you and the goal you want the website to achieve.
However, there are some key things you should aim for:
Make sure your personal website communicates professionalism and credibility |
Outline not only your technical skills, but also the skills that are even more important for the future of work – such as critical thinking, creativity, teamwork, problem solving, and empathy |
Showcase your different interests: write about your volunteering efforts, causes you are passionate about, and – in your portfolio or list of projects – show a wide range of things you worked on or at |
If you’re going through work history, it’s always useful to feature your unique contribution, lessons learned, and how it all relates to where you are today |
Make it easy for people to reach out to you via email, phone, or social media accounts |
5. Final touches
It may have been a lot of work, but after the initial clean-up, all you have to do is maintenance! Final touches include making sure you have the same professional headshot and short bio on all your online profiles and making sure you updated the privacy settings on all your profiles.
As you go along, your professional goals will probably change, and your personal brand and personal website should reflect that. However, the core of who you are will remain the same, and that is something you should always keep in mind. After all, that is what determines the criteria on which you will judge all your online activities.
Conclusion
Congratulations, you set the foundations of your personal branding strategy. As the colder months approach, you should start putting your personal website to work.
Make sure to include it in your email signature, social media bios, and business cards.
That way, by the time the new year approaches, you will have a set foundation for the next big step in making your personal brand stand out – setting up a professional blog – but more on that next time.
Ready to build your brand and stand out from the competition? Browse our website building hub to help you jump ahead of the crowd. With 50 useful resources, you can’t go wrong!